In UK English, "have got" is the only grammatical possibility. In US English, there is no situation where you could grammatically substitute one for the other without changing the meaning. So there is a difference, although it blurs when you combine US and UK English.
–
Peter Shor Oct 28 '11 at 13:31

5 Answers
5

I try to avoid the "have got" constructions whenever possible. Usually where you feel like saying "I have got" you could substitute the simpler "I have" and no one would be the wiser. Unless you're speaking informally and using got for emphasis, as in "I have got to get out of this place," you can usually just drop that got.

As for gotten, I see no harm in using it informally in sentences like "I have gotten quite good at archery," although if you want to speak more formally you could say "I have become quite good at archery." Still, who would use the latter when boasting about archery prowess in a bar?

Is "I've to go now" and "I've a lot of friends" considered grammatical?
–
PacerierMay 13 '12 at 21:34

2

@Kosmonaut I'd say that in those two examples, got is actually being used as an intensifier and not as a past-tense verb. In the first example, you can even use gotten instead and the meaning would change to something like "I went from not having many friends to having many."
–
JezJun 10 '12 at 9:38

@Pacerier: They're both "grammatical" (whatever that means), but they're not interchangeable with the full forms in all contexts. Bear in mind the written form is really an irrelevancy here - it's real spoken language. There are many contexts where you can quite reasonably articulate "I have" as a single syllable.
–
FumbleFingersApr 3 '13 at 3:09